Engaged Skills
This section helps you to consider what matters to you now. What is important to you? What kind of person do you want to be? What do you care about? These things are called your values. Being in touch with your values and then using them to set goals and actions is what we called ENGAGED skills.
To help you to explore the question of “What matters to you now?” you might like to have a look at the worksheet called the Values Compass, here. The “Ideas about values” worksheet can also help.
Values give us meaning and purpose, but they can be a bit too broad by themselves. Translating values into goals and actions can also be helpful. The more specific we get can also reveal the obstacles and barriers we naturally face when thinking about changing habits.
These worksheets also help you to set goals and actions, in line with your values and to keep an eye on how you are doing:
Imagine one year from now
This audio exercise can also help you to work on ENGAGED skills.
Start Close In
Source: ~David Whyte, Start Close In, from River Flow: New and Selected Poems, Copyright 2006, David WhyteMany Rivers Press, Langley, WA. www.davidwhyte.com
Expectations
One of the things that can be tricky about grieving is other people’s opinions about grief. We can also have our own expectations about our grief that can be tricky too. In thinking about how to handle other people (or how you relate to your own expectations) it can be useful to use the Dealing with other people’s expectations worksheet.
Dealing with other people’s expectationspdf | 281.46 KB Dealing with other people’s expectations
docx | 892.13 KB
That worksheet also has ideas about your own expectations of your grief. If you are telling yourself lots of ‘shoulds’ about how you should be doing, or if you are being hard on yourself because of how you are doing, then you might also want to check out the video “Introducing your advisor mind” and “How are you talking to yourself”.
A life to go back to
After 6 weeks
Everybody goes away.
They’re attentive
For a while.
‘Are you over it yet?’
Everything that’s normal Fades.
Then your friends go
Back to their lives.
You’d like to go back
To yours,
But somehow,
It’s not there
For you to go back to.
(Peter, 79 years, bereaved husband)
Source: Gerber, K., Brijnath, B., Lock, K., Bryant, C., Hills, D., & Hjorth, L. (2022).
Unprepared for the depth of my feelings’ - Capturing grief in older people through research poetry.
Age and Ageing, 51(3), 1–7.
doi.org/10.1093/ageing/afac030
One particularly important aspect of how different people manage grief is how they feel about traditions, such as at religious events, holidays or family gatherings. It can be useful to also consider how to mark anniversary events such as the deceased person’s birth date, or to commemorate the day that they died. This worksheet is designed to help you be open to this as a source of difficulty and to plan how to handle it in advance.
Tradition planningpdf | 302.54 KB Tradition planning
docx | 896.52 KB
Continuing Bonds
One way of considering the future in a helpful way can be through the idea of Continuing Bonds. Watch this video to learn more and then have a look at the worksheet.
It can be difficult thinking about the longer term future for yourself, and the timing of how you handle that is in your hands. No one can really tell you what you should or shouldn’t be doing, but try and let your experience be the guide. You will know when you are ready. Two exercises that can help with this are the audio exercise “What would your loved one want for you?” and the worksheet “Your story isn’t finished...”.
What would your loved one want for you?
This audio exercise can also help you to work on ENGAGED skills.
pdf | 342.48 KB Your story isn’t finished...
docx | 891.55 KB